Milton students perform song inspired by Boston Marathon runner

Wednesday

Mar 26, 2014 at 1:00 AMMar 26, 2014 at 9:09 AM

A group of eighth-grade students from Milton's Pierce Middle School were in Quincy on Tuesday to record the chorus of a song inspired by the story of a Boston Marathon runner who had trained hard for the race but was stopped short by a pair of explosions at the finish line.

Neal Simpson The Patriot Ledger @nsimpson_ledger

Some 20 teenagers crowded into a Hancock Street recording studio and slipped on headphones Tuesday morning as a photographer snapped pictures and cameramen set up their gear.

The group of eighth-grade students from Milton’s Pierce Middle School had come to record the chorus for a song written last year by a woman inspired by the story of a Boston Marathon runner who had trained hard for the race but was stopped short by a pair of explosions at the finish line. The song was first performed in Milton last June. It has inspired a letter-writing initiative aimed at bringing attention to the achievements of marathon runners at a time when the news is saturated with stories about those hurt and killed by the bombs and the men accused of planting them.

“Don’t get me wrong, the victims and their families are at the forefront of our thoughts always, but I just felt the runners had worked so long to get to that day and had overcome so much,” said Kathy Ready, the Westwood woman who wrote the song. “I just felt that some focus had to fall on them. They had overcome so much.”

Ready’s song, titled “I Will Run Again,” and her brother’s vision for it led the pair to start an initiative, called The Run Again Project, to inspire students to write open letters to the Boston Marathon runners and think about their own goals and aspirations.

So far, schools in Quincy, Milton, Boston and Westwood have signed up.

“Many of them talk about perseverance and not giving up, and them being proud about what they’re doing, and that we’re united in our strength – many of the same messages that I think came through in the lyrics of the song,” said Karen Spaulding, principal of Pierce Middle School, where many students have been writing letters for the project in their English and writing classes.

Brian Kelley, Ready’s brother and a Milton resident, said the letters will be posted on the project’s website, www.therunagainproject.org, starting April 1. The site will also feature a professionally produced recording of “I Will Run Again,” as sung by chorus students from the Pierce school.

Ready, who sells cosmetics, said she was inspired to write the song after a chance encounter with a marathon runner in a Norwood bakery the Friday after the marathon. She struck up a conversation with the runner, whom she knows only as Terry, while they were waiting in line for pastries. Ready learned how hard the woman had trained for the marathon, only to be stopped short of the finish lines because of the explosions.

Ready said she was just about to place her order when the woman asked if she would hug her.

“I hugged her and held her for a while,” Ready said. “She said, as I was letting go, ‘I will run again.’”

Ready was inspired by the encounter to write a poem and chorus that her brother would later bring to the Milton Music Fest, where it was performed by the Pierce Middle School Treble Chorus. Kelley, one of the event’s organizers, thought the song should reach a wider audience and decided to try to tie it into a letter-writing campaign that would share the song’s message about perseverance in the face of adversity.

The concept was quickly embraced at Pierce Middle School, where Spaulding said the letters have given some students a venue to express their feelings about a traumatic moment in their young lives. She said one letter brought to her by a sixth-grader last week moved her to tears.

“It was those words of a child that both recognized that this was something very tragic and upsetting and horrible that happened,” she said, “but there was also that hope, and we get our best hope and our light from our children and their words.”

Contact Neal Simpson at nesimpson@ledger.com or follow him on Twitter @NSimpson_Ledger.